Tag: machine translation

If you haven’t checked out Bad Translator, you don’t know what fun you are missing.

Original text:

“I think I’ll use Google Translate to localize my website so that everyone can understand it.”

…50 translations later Google gives us:

“You know, if you use Google, I think all the ingredients.”

Bad Translator does something quite simple, but demonstrates a great point. It asks Google and Bing to translate a phrase from English into another language and back again. Repeating this process dozens of times is reminiscent of the “Telephone” game we used to play as children: whisper a few words into one person’s ear, repeat it to the next, and by the end of the line you get something totally wacky. Often, the results are hilarious.

But if you’re using Google Translate or Bing to translate your company website, the results are often less funny. You quickly lose control of your message and have no idea how you are presenting yourself to foreign audiences.

Google said Thursday it has reached an agreement with European patent authorities to use its online technology to translate some 50 million patents.

…

Mountain View, California-based Google will gain access to all the translated patents – more than 1.5 million documents and 50 000 new patents each year – which will help improve its machine translation technology. Moreover, it will also deal with the growing amount of technology-related information in Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Russian.

It’s no secret that Google’s ambition for cataloging the world’s information encompasses every language. Through many efforts, including its translator toolkit, Google has been gathering raw data on translations from professional translators. Since teaching a computer grammar and syntax logic has not brought new gains, the best approach seems to be to mimic. That is, if Google’s computers can see enough examples of proper translations done by professional translators, eventually the computer can simply cut and paste phrases and put it all together.

As a patent translator, I wouldn’t be scared by this just yet. Google’s machine translation still has a long way to go before it can truly understand us mere mortals. Take a look at the following machine translation for a shipping product in Apple’s iPhone App Store.

Don't hire Google Translate to do your App Store marketing

For those who don’t read French, it says “Now available in unemployment insurance French!”